RICH nations are guilty of an “obscene exploitation” of the world’s poor by poaching health workers from developing countries, doctors’ leaders said yesterday.
James Johnson, the chairman of the British Medical Association (BMA), condemned what he described as the “rape” of countries such as Ghana, South Africa and Zimbabwe, which provided Western nations with thousands of healthcare workers.
Delegates at the BMA conference in Manchester discussed the idea of a “transfer fee” on overseas recruitment — paying the Third World a fee for doctors and nurses who move to Britain and elsewhere to work.
“In the UK we have around 120,000 doctors practising medicine,” Mr Johnson said. “The USA employs over 50 per cent of all English-speaking doctors in the world. In Australia, a country of 20 million people, they have 48,000 doctors.
“In Ghana, which also has a population of 20 million, they have only 1,500 doctors in the entire country. In Mozambique, with the same number of people, it is even worse. They have just 500.” Describing it as “reverse aid”, Mr Johnson added: “It is completely pointless for the UK to give $300 million in aid to Africa if we then systematically rob them of their most precious resource — intellectual capital and the practical ability to prevent and treat disease.”
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Kate Adams, a GP from Hackney, East London, said that they should consider the idea of compensating Third World countries for staff who come to Britain and elsewhere — essentially paying a “transfer fee” to help to boost their own health systems. “It’s about doctors having a value,” she said. “If there is a football team, you want a good team. These are expensive players, you pay for them.” In Britain training a student to consultant level costs up to £250,000.
Victor Dedjoe, the secretary-general of the Ghanaian Medical Association, said that the exodus of health workers from African nations was “an enormous problem”. He said that more attention needed to be focused on health and education to improve health services in the Third World and called for world leaders attending the G8 summit next month to give the issue priority.